An end is needed for Pennsylvania's voter ID confusion

So it seems the judiciary has allowed another election to pass in Pennsylvania without treating the right to vote akin to a purchase of drugstore cough medicine.

In his ruling last week, Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley cited “inaccurate” information from the state as a hardship upon voters during previous attempts to implement the state’s onerous voter ID law.

The ruling came at the end of a trial this summer spurred by lawsuits to overturn a voter ID law that was enacted to coincide with the 2012 presidential election. The law has been suspended for a third time while McGinley prepares a hopefully final ruling on the trial testimony.

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We need to put this one to bed, because uncertainty over the law’s fate and requirements of the law itself have confused both voters and the people who manage polling places. And confused voters means fewer people vote.

That, of course, is the idea on the part of those who birthed the law in the first place. Given the enormous Democratic voter registration advantage in Pennsylvania, it serves the interests of a Republican- controlled state government if a lot of them stay home on election day.

It’s hard to argue, after all, against naked admissions of political shenanigans.

It’s plain that vote engineering is the real motive behind voter ID campaigns. In Pennsylvania at least, the people most likely to lack an approved ID card are the elderly, the poor, minorities and those who live in cities - all solid Democratic constituencies that tend to occupy urban concentrations east and west.

But the most loathesome aspect of suppressive voter ID efforts is the way they undermine a core right of American citizenship. The fact is simply this: If you’re an American citizen without a felony conviction, you have an unfettered right to vote, approved identification or not.

The disengenuous excuse for saying otherwise is that voter impersonation fraud at the polls — notice we said impersonation, not registration — demands that voters prove their identity with a piece of plastic. But voter impersonation fraud is such a nonissue that the state declined to make it a factor in this summer’s trial.

Think of it in terms of another cherished American right, the presumption of innocence when accused of a crime. “Innocent until proven guilty” is such a bedrock concept of American existence that numerous, anti-prosecution safeguards are built into our legal system to protect it. In short, we’d rather let the guilty walk than convict the innocent.

Well, we’d say the right to vote occupies at least as lofty a perch as the right to a presumption of innocence. So it’s far better, in terms of free and fair elections on the widest possible scale, to let a few cases of fraud slip by if the only means to stop them is to nudge hundreds of thousands away from the polls.

Particularly when most of them tend to vote a certain way. Leave elections to the widest possible input from the electorate, and let ideas and characters win the day without subversion from politicians seeking to trade basic American rights for partisan advantage.